This course focuses on selected English writers of poetry, drama, and prose from the late 14th to the early 18th centuries. The following literature will be studied: The General Prologue in Geoffrey Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales; Shakespeare’s King Lear; poems by John Donne; selections from John Milton’s Paradise Lost; Aphra Behn’s Oroonoko; Part 4 of Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels. Class discussion of each work will sometimes focus on its treatment of social, political, and economic issues of the period in which it was written: for instance, the alleged corruption of the late-medieval Church and the questioning of conventional gender roles in the early modern period.
Course requirements:
two quizzes, 20% each;
research essay (1500 words), 30%;
final exam, 30%
Texts:
- Joseph Black et al., eds., The Broadview Anthology of British Literature, Concise Edition, Volume A (The Medieval Period, The Renaissance and the Early Seventeenth Century, The Restoration and the Eighteenth Century), Third Edition
- William Shakespeare, King Lear (Broadview)
- The texts will be available at the UBC Bookstore in a specially priced, shrink-wrapped package.
- King Lear is available on the anthology’s website.